Moon, council, spar over street improvements

HILLSDALE — Hillsdale Mayor Doug Moon battled with members of the Hillsdale City Council Monday night while discussing ways to help improve the condition of streets in the city.

Council members Ruth Brown, Casey Sullivan and Mary Wolfram each spoke in favor of finding ways of funding improvement of the roads, while Moon argued the proposal that was defeated on the last ballot was the best plan they had.

"There is no one single change that can be done to take care of the streets in Hillsdale short of completely cutting services," Moon said. "We are at the point where we have cut so many services... we can say 'yes we're going to look into this or we're going to cut that,' but honestly that's just feel-good lip service to people because there is only so much more we can take out."

Wolfram asked if there were options council could explore to help with some of the problems, such as a special assessment that would require residents of a certain road to fund part of the project if they were willing. If those residents wanted to help fund a large chunk of the project, then Wolfram asked if the city could chip in to cover a smaller portion.

"I think we need to continue our quest on how to do it," Wolfram said. "We can't give up trying to find a way to fix the problem."

Wolfram admitted she didn’t think special assessments were the best option, but if there were some instances where neighborhoods were willing to pay the money council should give those options to people.Moon said he was not opposed to the idea, but he thought the amount needed to be raised by residents would be too much for most areas.

"My thought is if people didn't want to pay 1 percent of their income for streets, they're sure as heck not going to want to pay thousands of dollars to pitch in for their neighbors," Moon said.

Ruth Brown said she felt the problem with the proposal to tax residents by 1 percent of their income was not the proposal, but with the lack of a plan. The suggestion caused Moon to attack Brown’s support, or lack thereof, of the tax proposal.

"It doesn't help the cause when someone who is on council who sees that there is a plan, riding around saying 'there is no plan,' undermining the process," Moon said about Brown. "This was your approach on this entire project all that time. If you weren't in favor of it, you were against it and you were against it all the way through."

Sullivan said he was approached in the past by a handful of residents who were willing to explore the costs of raising some money on their own.